Horrors imagined and real in "The Pillowman"

There is, the poet William Wordsworth wrote, "a tale in everything." And in "The Pillowman," Martin McDonagh's voluble and provocative play, everyone has a tale to tell. Or many.

What the often brutal stories woven into this surreal, Kafkaesque slant on "Arabian Nights" reveal — about their tellers, the dark side of the psyche, and a society obsessed with both order and violence — is deliberately ambiguous.

But in Kurt Beattie's potent ACT Theatre staging of the award-winning tragicomedy, the concerns McDonagh wrestles with (as both lurid prankster and closet stage moralist) emerge in sharp relief.

In fact, "Pillowman" is a more stimulating work here than in its star-studded but garishly morbid and glib 2005 Broadway staging. McDonagh's unique gifts are better served in this airing — even if one still questions the depth of his trademark toying with the grisly and grotesque.

A word to the wary: "Pillowman" remains a profane Gothic thriller of sorts, with verbal and visual allusions to torture and murder that, in this version, do not feel gratuitous. It concerns Katurian, a relentless yarn-spinner who has penned 400 (unpublished) short stories, mostly imaginatively warped accounts of unhappy, abused children. Some are told and read to us. Others are enacted on Matthew Smucker's ingenious, multilevel concrete box of a set, which capably houses the play's several layers of fantasy on ACT's circular stage.

Portrayed with riveting intensity by Matthew Floyd Miller, Katurian has been hauled in by authorities investigating a series of repellent crimes against youngsters. In an interrogation room, the Mutt-and-Jeff pair of detectives assigned to badger, bully and break Katurian have become avid readers of his tales — and amateur critics of them, too.

In a nearby room, also in custody, awaits Katurian's mentally disturbed brother Michal (Shawn Telford). He also knows these stories well. And what effects have they had on his stunted mind? Are they simply harmless imaginings? Or blueprints for torture and murder?

Those familiar with McDonagh's work (e.g., "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," "A Skull in Connemara") will quickly spot in "Pillowman" a defense and sendup of his own blood-stained, Tarantino-influenced, "fashionably downbeat" oeuvre.

"I'm not trying to say anything," Katurian insists. "I just write stories. That's all I do. That's my life."

But Katurian's stories are in part shaped, we learn, by the extreme child abuse in his own past. His interrogators offer a counterpoint to his alleged moral neutrality, raising legitimate qualms about the violence in his word-pictures. And that, in turn, raises another concern: Does disturbing art warrant authoritarian repression?

The wily detective Tupolski (Denis Arndt) and his enforcer sidekick Ariel (R. Hamilton Wright) are a second set of brothers here. And they do a lot of good cop/bad cop riffing, which is welcome comic relief.

But Arndt's superb turn as Tupolski also gives the play a moral gravitas it needs (and, on Broadway, didn't get). With caustic sarcasm, and weary regret, Arndt expresses a sense of deep outrage that persists despite his own ethical abdication to a corrupt system — and his own story of loss.

Arndt's performance, and Wright's as a brute with a heart and his own demons, are links in a strong ensemble chain. Miller shuttles between anguish, outrage and cockiness. As the damaged Michal, Telford is restrained in his craziness, and has a scrappy rapport with Miller in their long, revelatory scene together.

The poised youth actors Corina Boettger and Joshua Froebe handily depict a number of children in extremis. And in the same stories, Julie Briskman and Ian Bell are archetypal parents-from-hell. Also notable: Adam Stern's moody original music, and Mary Louise Geiger's creepy-to-blazing lighting.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com